THE DRUMBEAT...PEOPLE NOT PROJECTS

Here is my latest article for National Catholic Register. Thank God people send me emails when the columns come out or I would never know. Gotta remember to subscribe one of these days....

So, this is my most prototypical schtick. I think even my cat Tibby can summarize the salient points. A snip...

Eventually, the industry will need overt preachers and evangelists to support the troops by teaching and ministering here. But as the first wave, Hollywood needs artists who have their spiritual, moral, emotional and professional acts together.

We need people in place who give a witness to the truth of the Gospel by their lives and by the quality of the work they do. We don't need sermons, tracts, conferences and study guides from the Church. We need people of rectitude, discernment, peace, joy, passion, mercy, kindness -artists and professionals who have been transformed by the love of Jesus - to come to Hollywood, to make beautiful things and to build bridges of friendship with the people outside their family of faith.

Another...

We need people to be sent [to Hollywood], but we need people who know what awaits them and have a spiritual strategy to transform the realities of an industry career from stumbling blocks into stepping stones to deeper communion with God.

The Christians who make it in both the business and in their relationship with God are those who take seriously what the Holy Father calls "the artist's special relationship to beauty." This is to live keenly focused on beauty in terms of mastery of their craft and then beauty of life and beauty of soul. They take Christian community very seriously, the way a man in a desert knows where the wells are.